No stupid questions thread?Oh well, I have one about C4D. Is there any way to add step interpolation via Xpresso? Say I want to rotate an object over time by 5 degrees rather than smoothly. How do I achieve that?

My mesh is made of primitives like in old games so as to avoid deformation. The arms aren't connected to the body and the right one behaves as it should. But when I move the left one it deforms the mesh near it. Why is that?

>>578767With an inset, just like in your pic.You can't really subdivide just part of a mesh without figuring out a way to handle all of the splits. If you wanted to subdivide the center (yellow) polygons further, you'd have to make more splits all around.

>>578796Pretty much. The only way to maintain quads (assuming it matters) is by running a loop somewhere through the entire mesh, even if it has to loop back in on itself. By redirecting a loop back in the same direction it came from, you can at least localize the area you're subdividing, however I should point out that doing so too often in one area will produce a disproportionate amount of poly density compared to the rest of the mesh, which may have unintended effects on the overall appearance of deformations and shading.

>>578797Try and place them in areas devoid of large bends or creases, the flatter the better, it's just about not having them in places where they'll get in the way. There will always be places of visual rest, dump 'em there.

When mirroring weights in Maya, there's a single joint on the right side (upper arm joint segment 1) that won't take any influence when mirroring. Yes, it's part of the bind. What's strange is that it works when mirroring from the right side to the left. I'd prefer to not have to paint this part of the body again, though (upper arm, clavicle, upper spine, what a total mess).

why the fuck does the material editor doesn't keep my scene's materials in the slot area?

I always have to dig around different navigators, or use "pic material from object" to get them into the slot, and they are gone as soon as I close and reopen in

and on that note, when I have some object selected and I open the material editor, it fucks up the pbject's material with no "undo" option (turns to black, become some new default Vraymtl, whatever, the original is gone)

I have no clue how to phrase these things for google, and it's get more annoying the more complex stuff I do, pls help

It seems like it's possible, and that it's an already existing feature in most flood fill tools, except it gets disabled, since people usually want to fill the are with a single color, not a gradient.I'm not a programmer, though, so I don't know how to use that...

I would just paint it myselft, but it's meant to be a mask for a shader, so I need the gradient to be precise, not hand-painted.And also, depending on the texture, it could take a lot of time

how do i set up animatable 2d faces on 3d surfaces?all my searches come up with are static solutions with texture or geometry switching, but i'm interested in something like the faces in "jelly jamm" where the pupils and mouth can slide around and be scaled in 2d in addition to just switching

>>579665I'm not sure it you're looking for a 2D version of the radiative heat transfer function (which is the same thing path tracing renderers use) or something like this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithmIn any case it's doable but I don't know of any ready made tool that does it.

What are the best tutorials on modeling a base character mesh in 3ds max (or Maya, Blender, doesn't matter)? I want to try doing it that way, instead of starting from scratch in zbrush. I've seen some tuts on YT, but I'm not sure if their topology is good, and I don't want to learn bad habits.

>>580041Does it provide a better quality than a photo, though? I can always shoot in high resolution and reduce the size of a map as needed, while generating other maps with crazybump. And taking a photo will take significantly less amount of time.

>>580124no, i didnt mean to stack one on top of the other, i see now that i didnt word my question proparly.what i was asking is whether using the edit poly modifier is the same as right clicking and then converting to editable polyit kinda looks like im getting the same options, but im not sure if one offers some better advantages than the other

>>580035i used to think making basemeshes with ortographic shots was accurate but boy i was wrong.even if you model is a 100% in terms of topology and anatomy, it will still be slightly off because you are modeling from 2 refs that aren't exactly the same. even a slight tilt in the person's head can be a disaster.its best to sculpt every organic model, even if you find it difficult

What is the modern approach to creating foliage like grass, flowers and bushes? Should I be sculpting leaves in zbrush and texture them "somewhere", or is using textures from photographs on planes also good? Currently, I'm using photos because it seems to be a lot easier and faster, but if the quality of foliage would improve, then I want to learn how to do it in zbrush, the only problem is that I don't know where to find good tutorials for that.

>>580331They work the same, the only difference is what the other anon said, one keeps your other modifiers intact, while the other collapses previous ones into an editable poly, you lose some control over it but it saves memory or what not, so it might be good to do it before exporting.

Also, you could always read a manual by yourself and get an even more detailed explanation.

>>580111The difference is that if you're not happy with the result of an edit, instead of undoing or loading an earlier save, you can just delete the edit poly modifier to scrap the changes and try again.Or, for instance, you can make a version of your optimized low-poly mesh with all the edges connected and made into quads for export into ZBrush or Mudbox, and when you're ready to bake, you simply turn off the edit poly with the quads and bake onto your optimized original.Another possibility is say making a spline shape, extruding it, making the extrusion a poly, and then detaching a surface off that poly for the base of your next mesh, all while still having access to your original spline. So you save your complex creation process for geometry.One caveat is that Max works by numbering all of the verts in the scene and mesh operations are usually performed based on vertex id, so if you make a primitive, and throw on an edit poly, and then go back down and change a parameter, it may screw up the poly edit on top, depending on how it was generated. So if you inset a face on the side of a cylinder and add more sides, the inset will move with the side it was created on, but if you inset the end cap, it will stay inset with any number of sides, so it's a crap shoot as to whether or not you'll screw things up by going back to change things.

>>580331It depends... technically the edit poly mod offers all the exact same editing options, however, the way it's treated by Max under the hood isn't. This shouldn't pose a problem for you unless you start piling on custom scripts and modifiers that somehow manipulate an object on the poly level, because usually they expect the base object to be a poly, if you have say a cylinder with an edit poly on top, you may get unexpected results or a crash instead. There's a script on scriptspot.com that fixes this behavior if it ever happens to be an issue and script makers usually make note of whether or not their tools do this.

>>580627Diff/norm/spec is one of the two PBR solutions available (the other being metalness), but if you wanna go outside physically based materials/shading, those softwares wont display what you want (ie. non-physical stuff) though still allow you to create any maps you like.

If you wanna go outside PBR, that might be an issue nowadays since most engines are complying to it. Note that even stylized/painted textures can respect PBR though, it's just a whole matter of coherent properties and energy conservation.

>>580627I don't see why not, just untick all the boxes that give you fancy effects when applying any effect or layer, but IMO having the option is better than not. Not sure what your alternative would have been anyway, Mari and 3D Coat also follow PBR standards.Also as >>580628 said, when importing content into a game engine, it'll likely expect you to supply it with compliant data anyway. You can always come up with a creative use for the extra effect layers even if you just want a simple painted look.

>>580627yeah. you can customize your exporter to a specific engine like half life or soma. so you can save the preset and everytime you texture for a specific engine its gonna export the exact textures you need

>>580628>>580642>>580648I can see the viewport disparity being the number one issue. I can probably just use PBR anyway, I just won't be able to use reflection probes since I'm procgenning everything. Hopefully I can just get everything using the same enviro map so that it's all consistent + I can use that in the viewports.

Another PBR question now that we've gotten into it: Is Metal/Reflectance PBR the catch-all PBR format? In other words, is Metal/Reflectance and Normal/Specular ever used in the same game/engine for different effects or is it always one format?

>>580703It's sometimes fixed to one format because the map types aren't interchangeable and linked to the lighting engine, would require a lot of extra code.They key difference between Metal/Rough and Spec/Gloss is that the metal workflow is much easier, because the engine already has the reflectance values for non-metal and metal surfaces already hard-coded in, and all you have to do is tell it whether it is metal or not. It get a lot more control to defend be how rough metal is with this workflow.In order to work with Spec/Gloss you need to stay to known/measured values for each material type, and then when you do want to define a metal, you also have to set the color of that metal in the specular map. It's possible to be more accurate about the reflectance properties of non-metallic objects, however it's noticeable in maybe 10% of surfaces at best and most are content with the trade-off.

>>581584Having to import the scene to Unreal and set everything up to work properly is not exactly what I'd call a "realtime viewport", and even then it's not even close to being a path tracer. Literally any GPU-accelerated renderer like Redshift, VRayRT or Octane would be a better choice.

I'm a newbie and won't really get into 3D modeling any time soon, but I'll get a gayming mouse and it has a replacement something that you can print yourself with a 3D printer.What program would be the simplest and easiest to work with that? Also, I don't think it will that easy as just change the name in and box, or will it? Here you have the file so you can tell me what to do. Also, if you know the best place to order a 3D print of this. I'd prefer rubber.https://steelseries.com/rival500nameplate

How hard is it to create old-school graphics like this? How easier/harder is the texturing? Because I could even just drag and drop some good smart material in substance in 5 seconds, while I don't know how I'd make this. Is it complicated to achieve this rendering in UE4/Unity?

>>581658>Low resolution textures>Nearest neighbour texture filtering>Basic light info/AO painted into the textures>Global light info painted into the vertex colors>Render the whole thing at low resolution, with no post-processing at all (no anti-aliasing, no nothing)

This style shines thanks to good color theory, and good control over the tiling of the textures, which this game kinda lacks.

Spyro would be a good reference.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjWM37hpzeQhttp://www.isd2184.net/sichmeller/vgd/color.pdf

>>581667There were two key aspects of PS1 graphics:1. Its lack of floating point math, the reason why the polygons seemed to warp the way they did is that they simply snapped to the nearest whole integer coordinate. Since not using FP for rendering vertices likely isn't possible in modern game engines, if you want to replicate this effect you need to setup a fine grid to which you have the verts snap to.2. As in pic related, texture projection basically lacked a Z component, so the texture is just sliced in half and reassembled, so on top of warbled geometry, textures also seemed to slide around the surface they were rendered on. This could be circumvented by using a fixed camera or simply not using textures in areas that might be susceptible, so as a result some games like Spyro used simple colored polygons a lot of the time and only had textures were it was really needed.

>>581680Oh, I don't really have any desire to recreate it, I'm just interested in the process after seeing that trailer. Because I've seen people complain it's an easy mode for a developer, and I thought it's actually not that trivial to pull off.

>>581751I dont know all the blender terms but basically..I want a 'mesh' or 'model from a pre-made height map.As I explained here>>581746When I import my height map (the one on the right in pic). some parts of the image get cut off.As you can see in the pic the model created on the left is only a part of the actual image on the right.

>>581752your texture is greyscale already, so it means it can be a heightmap. but its too dirty to make a mesh of it.you can assign a material to a plane and copy these nodes.OR if you want a model its best you model it yourself (or have someone else to do it).

does this video use any 3dcg effects in the sense of figures/characters being created through digital means? generally i can tell what effects are physical/stop motion animated and what are 3d but in this case.. some of what's going on here is hard to imagine having been stop motion animated

>>581685Nothing in 3D that actually looks any good is trivial to pull off. If we're talking whole artstyles, anyway. Of course you can make a lone, simple, realistic-style asset pretty good looking pretty easily.

When the artstyle is something lazy/trivial, it shows. See: Dusk. Enemy models are literally babby's first 90 degree angle covered box model and it's visible from a mile away. Looks like a fucking Net Yaroze game.

Currently sculpting pic related, concept of mine. What pose/position do the hands/body need to be in if I want to rig this guy later on? I've never done something like this, this character walks on his knuckles and walks mostly on all fours (can maybe rear up on the hind legs.) I've only ever mostly sculpted bipeds and in the usual t-pose before, not sure what to do here.

I'm following a rigging tutorial for blender and it says to use keep offset on the legs to the body and also do the same for the whole armature to a single bone to easily move the whole thing around. When I move the parent bone though it rotates. In the video the parent bone stays vertical but when I do it it bends backwards. The same thing happens with the whole armature on a single bone, when I move the bone the model moves but it also rotates around.

Kinda confused about animation programs. Is MotionBuilder designed so you use pre-made animations/import animations, or is it also good for creating your own animations in it? If it isn't, is there a program that does 3d rigging and animating and is not reliant on just importing pre-made ones?

>>582213Just keep it with all limbs stretched and centered out, the whole point is to keep the rigging and skinning process simple, and you can move it into a more neutral pose once you're done.Not super intuitive for the modeling phase, but the best solution that I found for creatures that can walk both bip and quad is to pick a median pose between the two extremes so that you won't have to deal with unusual deformations by going too far in either direction, so you'd have the body leaning at a 45° angle and the head looking forward, so that you won't need to bend the neck by more than an additional 45° depending on whether it's standing up or on all fours, instead of trying to figure out how to bend the head 90° one way.

Is it possible to delete part of a mesh/change the length of a mesh which still trying to use cloth sim on it?using the blender cloth sim, I want to make a large belt which threads through a hoop as shown in the pic. I was wondering how do I go about adjusting the length of the belt itself?

Either that or is there a way to create the belt so that it loops through the hoop?

Pretty new to Zbrush and all the terminology so bear with me, I used the BPR thing for my accurate lighting and shadows but my shadows are all fuzzy and pixelated. I have another sculpt where they're nice and crip lines. I obviously compared and adjusted all the settings in the sub-menus I thought would fix it but nothing has worked. Any ideas?

>>5759522d d/ic/k here. Starting to get interested in using 3d for concept work and illustration but am an absolute beginner 2d until now. Dont know sculpting from modelling and my only "3d" experience is Sketchup.

Seems like Maya (was thinking of 3ds max but maya pops up more in job listings - thoughts?) and Zbrush are base industry standards so will probably start from there. Whats the timeline learning on these programmes? Weeks? Years? I imagine it doesnt take as long as learning anatomy or values, or are these programs something you stew in and keep coming back to, using other programs (mudbox,vue,nuke,etc) as supplements? Is there a fundamentals list for 3d in terms of skills and software to get used to/familiar for industry work? Mainly keen on games and film.

>>582562Weeks for basics, months for the rest. If you dedicate yourself you'll be competent very soon, especially with Zbrush. The difference between sculpting is that you ignore topology and polycount in favour of using tools to sculpt a model like clay, whereas in Maya you move edges/verts/faces and you can't model with millions of polys like in Zbrush.

>>582562Time depends on how deep into it you want to go, if you double down on the basics for modeling, texturing and baking, you can get pretty decent in a couple of months of daily crunch.If you get into more technical things like rigging, animation, VFX and rendering, each of those will bite a massive chunk of time out of your schedule.You'll invariably want to know at least some rigging and animation basics just so that you can make competent models by having the requirements in mind and so that you can pose any figures you make instead of having them stuck in T-pose limbo.The programs you'll need are at the very least: 1. Main editing package (Max, Maya) 2. Sculpting (ZBrush, Mudbox) 3. Painting (Substance, Mari, 3D Coat)With any selection of these three, there's nothing you can't already make. It's also recommended if you get Marmoset Toolbag or Unreal 4 (free) if you intend to make game content as the viewports of the other programs offer a poor representation of what your content could look like running in an actual realtime environment, and again, it'll help you understand good practices since you'll know firsthand how to import game content yourself.Anything else is a specialty focus that you can generally do without; VFX, compositing and rendering can be left alone and you won't lose much for it unless one of those specifically interest you, but be warned, they can be extremely technical.In terms of Max vs. Maya, in my opinion Max is the simplest option to learn and get a hold of modeling basics, and since it's the first skill you need, it's arguably better than trying to make sense of Maya and learning how actually make something with it at the same time.In terms of ZBrush vs Mudbox, it's the same story but in reverse, Mudbox is much simpler, but it's arguably in your favor to endure the learning curve of ZB because you'll end off better for it in the end.(cont.)

>>582595For painting packages, Substance Painter is leaps and bounds ahead in resources, so even if it's lacking in some technical areas compared to the others, you'll save a lot of time and energy just going with it because you'll always have an answer to any question or problem you might have.For tutorial content, look up Grant Warwick, Tim Bergholz (Chamferzone) and Arrimus3D for Max tutorials, Michael Pavlovich for ZBrush, and Chamferzone again along with the official Substance YouTube channel tutorials for Painter.Your first steps will be to learn at least a few different major types of modeling (box, boolean, edge-extrude, sculpt + retopo) so that you can use the most appropriate techniques for any given subject, learn how to optimally bake high-resolution detail into a normal map onto a simplified mesh, and then texture it.

>>582667Watch some courses if you're a beginner, but once you have a cursory knowledge the best thing to do is think of a project you wanna do and just go at it without tutorials. Then only look up things you can't figure out on your own.

i'm having so much trouble with blender's texturing system in blender render. i want to make a couple of flat tiles for a game, but i keep running into display issues with the textures. for example, i'll create a plane, unwrap it, give a material, and assign an image texture to the material. i make sure that the image texture is selected in the UV/Image Editor too. ok, all is well, the texture is appearing in the viewport with texture shading selected. now i go to create another plane (i'm creating an entirely new one, not duplicating) and i want to apply a different image texture to it. i go through the same steps. however now both the planes have somehow been given the exact same texture. it doesn't matter what texture i pick from the texture tab in the properties window, it will always revert to the same image texture in the viewport. furthermore, now when i remove the material completely, it still shows the object with the image texture in the viewport, even though it doesn't even have material or a texture data (according to the properties window). on the other hand, if i render the scene, the appropriate textures will show up. i'm guessing there must be some hidden data block somewhere that is influencing this, but i have no idea what/where it would be...

>>582810yes, that's what i've started doing. i get rid of the texture and open up the new one, then i also have to go to the uv editor and select this new texture there before i can paint on it. it's kind of annoying to have to load so many different textures into the uv editor tho.

>>582919duplicate it so you have a backup, then boolean the pumpkin from the stem and then fix up the topology.

do you really need to remove that though? visually it's going to look the same regardless of it clips through or if it stops right on the surface, only way it'll look different is if you connect them and actually model where the surfaces meet

>>582922Not that guy, but I run into what he is wanting to do all the time.

I am not using any of my models for anything other than just rendering some scenes, but I do eventually intend to make some models for a game. Once my skills are up to making something with a low enough poly count, good details and all that jazz.

I have been under the assumption that clipping geometry like that is a bad idea for models intended for a game. Or does this actually not mater?

I have a long cube and I need to apply a brick texture to its sides - but without stretching the texture ridiculously - just repeat the texture on the meshhow do I do this? using blender and exporting to UE4

>>582930as long as it never slips out from an odd animation or the two parts having different physics it doesn't matter. sometimes the polycount is actually lower to just have floating intersecting geometry, even in modern games it's not really uncommon.

it's not suitable for a high poly model of a pumpkin that's supposed to look realistic because you would need to model where the stem forms and connects to the surface and the material changes, but that doesn't seem to be the situation.

Does anyone know how I make 2 separate meshes have a smooth effect in Blender?I've got a model that has a different mesh for a different facial expression, the meshes have some small differing amounts of vertices but they join up to the rest of the model at the same place. I want to be able to easily switch between the two without needing to entirely different character models. I tried using Shapekeys and having one mesh shrunken to nothing but that stuffs up when I try to apply a SubDiv.

How I get these to be separate meshes that still have a seamless smooth shading effect. I've tried using data transfer but that doesn't work with a subdiv either.

>>582966I've got a model with 2 separate face meshes, they each have their own number of vertices. However join the rest of the body at the same place and if were connected to the mesh would have no problem.But I can't have 2 faces at the same time.

If I have them disconnected and have separate objects I can easily toggle between each face, but as they aren't connected in a mesh they create a seam issue as shown in pic bottom right,Is there anyway of getting all the objects to have a smooth connection as if they were connected, but actually aren't?Surely there is a way instead of having 2 completely different full body modes with different faces. I only had the face in pic but there is more there.

>>582969From what I understand you're trying to create morph targets for just the face?Unfortunately it's not possible to morph only one part of a mesh using a data subset, if the geometry is contiguous then you *must* use a complete copy of the object even if what you're doing nothing more than adding a blink.If this fact triggers you, then you really only have two alternatives:1. Simply have the head be a separate object and hide the seam behind clothing by making as much of the bust as will be visible as part of the head mesh.2. Animate the face using bones.

>>582975In the end I figured out its the subdivision modifier that ruins it.I can manipulate the normals to do what I want and get it to work properly, but that doesn't carry over with the modifier. Mostly because when you subdivide it it makes a pretty much new mesh which makes my changes worthless.In the end I am just going to try and make face A look like face B using some shape keys. It will be annoying but better in the end.

Split both of them down the exact middle with bisect, keep the left of one and the right of the other, join them, and then use Snap to Symmetry and adjust the values until you can get the side with the vertex count you want to use to match with the other one. It might break horribly, or it might actually get pretty close. Then just split the other side off and mirror it again and join it as a shapekey to the original.

The mesh has a normal map applied to the material that I baked from xnormal. I think has something to do with my smoothing groups on the mesh that I used to bake to before hand.

I just did zbrush sculpt > decimation master to make low poly of said sculpt > unwrap.should I now do the tedious work or trying to give it all separate smoothing groups, give it all one smoothing group, none?

>>583004Well it shouldn't matter as long as xnormal made the normal maps based on the same smoothing you're using elsewhere, but in the offchance it isn't you could just smooth everything equally and the normal map will make it look sharper in those areas.

That's my fairly uneducated take though as I don't use xnormal and I'm not sure how it handles smoothing groups.

>>583079>2 - To the CADfags. What the hardware I'll need to a mid-end use on CATIA, SolidWorks, AutoCAD? CAD is very CPU-bound, so go for as much Ghz as you can, core count and threading are less important. an SSD is also preferable. RAM should be large enough to fit your project, rule of thumb is around 4~6GB + (file size x 20), so 16GB is a good amount. GPU choice is irrelevant as long as it's any Quadro.

I've tried dabbling in archimesh, but I have a couple of questions about it.

Sometimes autohole doesn't work. It's only after clicking autoboolean that the double doors are able to be fitted into the wall. Is that normal?

How do you freely edit the walls themselves? it seems that if you were to edit the walls, by say subdividing or making a new wall with extrude, as soon as you switch back to archimesh, it disappears. Is there any way to stop that?

How do you create branches of walls? I mean creating rooms inside the outer walls? Do you just create a new "room"?

Is there any way to disable archmesh after creating the walls? Sometimes I want to go further and make adjustments to a particular wall so I want to subdivide the wall mesh, but changing to archmesh reverts that.

I want to model a weapon. I watched how Arrimus3D does it, and then how Tor Frick does it. The differences are, black and white pretty much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvJkGEn4UpQ&t=1001s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3exuFW_3kus

What is the better option? The way Arrimus does it literally makes me scared, because it takes a shitton of time, and extruding polys like that is really painful. Tor's is a lot faster and seems more fun and creative, but I don't know if there are some big drawbacks with that method. I heard a lot that of people say that working with booleans like that is not the right way to do it because "reasons". What should I do?

I see he uses some kit in Modo btw, can I do that with 3ds max without any additional stuff, equally easy?

>>583146Keep on learning what Arrimus is teaching, but model the way you like. Important is to understand the correct way of edge flows and proper topology. If you know the rules you can break them and look with what you can get away with.

Booleans are not right or wrong, the end result is the important thing, how you got there is negligible.

>>583146There is no one right way to model anything, across his many videos I've seen Arrimus use subdivisions, booleans, and kitbash, so to me its clear that he uses the methods that he prefers for certain things, and the same goes for anyone. Some people might religiously place verts and edges manually as they go along, others block out big swaths of mesh and refine later, and others still might use a combination of both for the things they feel make sense to do so.

If your end result is to look like simple layered geometry, booleans are fine. If you want smooth flowing curves with fine control over the surface, with the possibility of flexing, you use subdivision surfaces. And if you want a more organic and free-form feel, you can sculpt first and then retopo. At the very least you should have a varied skill set so that you don't end up overthinking how to make an object using the only way you've learned, even if you settle on a preferred primary skill.

It also depends on what the purpose of the object is, fairly often the emphasis is on real-time environments, so regardless of how you choose to come to your end result, you'll be baking it down into a normal map on a low poly variant. In this case, you can be as wasteful in your modeling as you want, as the only thing that matters is that the final mesh can be baked without issue. Booleans are very powerful in this application for hard surface modeling, because all of their classically associated issues aren't that important as long as you take at least some care in cleaning up loose verts and edges as you go along, and Arrimus gives pretty good guidelines on how to do so. If you watch how Tim at ChamferZone works, he basically goes yolo on n-gons with 20 verts a piece, because as long as you have flat faces and edges in key places, you can throw down a chamfer and turbosmooth modifier and it'll look perfectly fine even if the wireframe might seem a bit messed up.

>>583161ProBooleans in Max are very non-destructive, especially since with the edit poly modifier you can alter the mesh or its components afterwards and still keep the boolean functioning.

The key to booleans is that once you start using them, you have to try and keep as much of your modeling within the boolean function. In other words, you don't punch a hole by subtracting a cylinder and then chamfering the edge, you have to widen the cylinder itself midway and chamfer *it*, so that the change propagates back to the main mesh. Imagine it the same as setting a pilot hole with a drill, you don't just make a hole and then dive in with a dremel, you have to use the same drill with a wider bit. If you think of booleans as working with a drill or CNC machine it'll make a hell of a lot more sense if you've ever actually done that before.

Similarly, when using booleans, you have to keep edge counts fairly high (but homogenous), so a good cylinder subtraction is one with 64 sides, and if you think you'll need a smooth edge on a subtracted surface, chamfer the thing you're subtracting with a ton of edges as well, never save it for later.

Ok someone fucking explain this to me like if I were retarded: I have a longsword (realistic shape and size) and the blade is very long and (relatively) thin. How do I UV this fucker properly? When I unwrap it, the blade is so long and thin that, keeping ratios (e.g. not making it as wide as it is long), it will go from one corner of UV space to the other, resulting in a very thin UV, so even a 2k texture is actually really small because it wastes like 95% of the UV space and it's like 50px across the width.

I'm pretty new to UV mapping, what am I supposed to do here? I could cut the blade up in many sections, but that would make a lot of seams along it. Some guy told me that "UV's don't need to be square" but I have no clue what that means.

>>583203It means UVs don't have to be square.There's U and V values when you set up a texture. If you set V to 2, then you're working with a 1:2 texture ie. something like 256x512 or 512x1024.Mileage may vary across packages, engines etc.

>>583203The thing is, what most people do is throw the weapon UVs into a pile with other things that have a very likely chance of appearing in the same scene, like an armor set and such.If you're doing this for real-time graphics, this is more efficient when you do have these things all on one texture because the engine only has to call the texture once for all objects, and because GPUs have so much memory now, big textures are no problem up to a point.So if the sword is only taking up a small aspect of the texture, that's fine, leave the rest for whatever else you may need. On the next object simply avoid the region where you set up the sword texture, and so on and so forth.

>>583210>>583213>>583218I see, thanks. How will this work with Substance Painter though? Since it works on the UVs after the squashing, it will probably end up with very smeared textures since the vertical axis is so squashed. As for using non-square textures that seems ideal but it also seems Painter can't bake those (only thing I find about it is 2 years old however so I'll try it myself when I get home).

>>583243I've heard of texture atlases, however it doesn't really solve the issue since even a 2k texture gets a bit blurry due to the high length to width ratio of the blade (I'd be able to fit a lot of them in one atlas that is true but they'd still be blurry). Since it's a first person project, the blade is going to be very close to the camera, meaning it will be very visible, so the only real ways to get around this issue are non-square textures or dealing with seams on the blade (which isn't ideal).

Wanted to try learning how to make clothing in blender and MD. Trying to do something like pic related. Having some trouble in blender in curving around the center golden hoop. Also having problems trying to get the cloth sim to place nice.

Also, unrelated to pic, I'm trying to make a curved edge (instead of sharp corners something to transition smoothly), but want to continue using quads. Is there a work around/method of doing this? It seems the only option is to just use tris instead of quads.

>>583254>I'm trying to make a curved edge (instead of sharp corners something to transition smoothly), but want to continue using quads. Is there a work around/method of doing this? It seems the only option is to just use tris instead of quads.

Having trouble deciphering what you're trying to say, is it something like pic related?There's no problem in using tris if the surface isn't going to have subdivisions on top of it.

>>583259haha sorry. I had some trouble trying to explain it as well. Pic related, I'm trying to make a smooth transition from different "lines" of my quads. Should I use tris, or is there another method?

>>583260also this ought to handle the shape you wanted while also being a lot simpler. if you need more geometry you can easily add some more with ctrl+r since there's no triangles around that would end a face loop

>>583247>>Or cut your blade into parts, if you use SP you can paint over the seams and they will not be visible.

Tried that, seems to work fine, except with materials and smart materials in Painter for some reason, where some seams show very blatantly. I don't really intend to just slap smart materials on stuff, but if a smart material has it, it's fair to assume my own material will encounter the same problem later down the line. Googled around and found a lot of supposed fixes, among which raising shader quality in Painter (doesn't work), making a cage for the bake, and pixel-aligning UVs. Haven't tried the later two, I assume making a cage is just about making a scaled up copy of the mesh that encompasses it? As for pixel-aligning UVs I have no clue how that would be done in any package, as far as I know UV's don't really have a pixel resolution inside the 3D package, so there'd be no finite amount of pixels to align to.

Pic related is the issue. Other people with similar issues had it more blatant with a mirror (0% roughness 100% metallic), but for me it seems that doesn't have any problems and only premade Substance materials and smartmats have it.

>>583261It's the part where I'm trying to attach the straps to the metal hoop. I have no idea how to curve it around the hoop smoothly without horrible clipping.

The odd grid is a rough example since I kinda deleted the original mesh i was working on since I got annoyed at myself. I tried extracting the mesh from a base model and zremesher on high res, which gave me the problem in the first place.

>>583263Assuming that you need to add the slope around a cylinder, how would you do it? And if I am aiming for a more curved loop, how do I go about it?

>>583244The texture itself won't be squashed, I'd assume? I've never tried it with Substance. I guess it's possible that, if Substance uses UV information to apply your brushes, you'd end up with squashed brushes, but even with the texture being "Squashed" to fit 1:1 UV space it doesn't smudge the pixels. It's not actually doing anything to the texture, just previewing where it fits on the 1:1 UV space: The texture itself would still be 1:2 or 1:3 or whatever.

I wouldn't bother going with non-square texture if you're using Substance since that software makes covering seams pretty trivial. Opting for a long or wide texture makes more sense if you're hand painting or adding texture in photoshop since you'd have to manually line up the seams otherwise.

>>583265>>583268If you're using a smart material with no cage, odds are it's working with solely with the UV information, meaning the seams are going to influence what the material does. If you were using a cage, it'd be using projections, and wouldn't care about the seams. I think? I'm not an expert on Substance Painter.

>>583273Haha. I am SO sorry. I am an idiot at explaining things. But thank you for explaining one of the problems I had.

I hope this pic can better illustrate the point. i'm basically trying to replicate this in blender. I used the torus for the hoops. Then I use a simple plane as the cloth. However, I don't know how to loop the cloth around the metal hoop. When I try to, it becomes a mess.

>>583272For the second thing with the cylinder you could just use a boolean to cut it into shape, there should be zero problems in doing so with booleans. of course just manually shifting the verts into place works too.

For your cloth attaching to the ring I made this little guide to show you how. Basically you detach some polygons from the ring itself to act as the end part of the cloth and push them out a little bit, then just extrude out for the strap itself. throw on a shell and you're done. I realize you're not using Max but maybe you've got some similar functionality and can make use of this.

>>583281>It's kinda frustrating that 3d feels, at times, harder to work with than IRL.You just need to broaden your knowledge of the little tricks that make these things simple to figure out. I personally never had to wrap cloth around a ring before, I literally made up how to do >>583279 just now because I did learn how to use the detach & refine method before for hard surface modeling, and immediately saw that it can be applied here.

>>583267This is the best solution I can come up with at the moment that isn't too complicated geometrically.

So you start with a torus to make the loop that the cloth is wrapped around. From there, duplicate it and cut it to where the cloth will attach, don't fill in the holes. Make a bevel along the outer edge from where you can extrude the cloth. Now you can cap the holes with quads and also add a bevel to the edge to help keep the shape when subdividing.

When extruding the cloth around the body just think about it as a short but wide cylinder that stretches upward here and there to be taller at the breasts and shorter at the back.

Hope this helps.

>>583279This is much more realistic though and less of a cheaty simplified mesh like mine.

>>583285Honestly I'm not well versed in anything other than Max and Substance Painter, and I'm currently trying my hand with tackling ZBrush. I dabbled with Max like 10 years ago for fun, but I only started seriously learning 3D sometime around July of this year, and began cramming Arrimus3D, ChamferZone and Grant Warwick. Also checked out Tor Frick, but I'm not sure I like his style.

>>583304It didn't have that before? Edge-extrusion modeling is like the most common modeling method for subdivision surfaces, how does a software like Maya not have it till now? How did you guys even live?

>>583310Apparently it was taken out whenever the new modeling suite was added (2014?) and only just came back in 2018 edition. I think I was using Max back then.It was just the shortcut that was missing, though, not edge extrude itself. You could still do it, but you'd have to fuck with the extrude controls every time and that was less than ideal.

>>583270>If you're using a smart material with no cage, odds are it's working with solely with the UV information, meaning the seams are going to influence what the material does. If you were using a cage, it'd be using projections, and wouldn't care about the seams. I think? I'm not an expert on Substance Painter.

What even is a cage? I swear someone pruned everything about them from google cause I can't find shit. As far as I understood it, it would be the same model but "inflated", aka all the vertices pushed out a bit along their normal. Is that correct? I'm working in Houdini so I simply put down an extrude, applied it to the whole mesh, and put it along point normal which seems to do exactly what it should, yet it doesn't really seem to work at all for baking (or maybe it does, but it's not fixing my issue). I also went through the maps, and it seems to be the AO and especially the curvature map that show the seams. I fixed the curvature by setting it to bake by vertex rather than pixel, but the AO seems fucked. Since it's the only map that is fucked (apart from ID but I don't think smartmats use that), I assume it's a problem with the AO.

My workflow is just: Make mesh and cage in Houdini->UV unwrap in Houdini with the seams->Export as .fbx and start project in Painter->Export cage as .fbx->bake maps with the cage->IT'S FUCKED

The fact that there's very little on google about this makes me think I'm the only one having so many issues with it. I can't imagine I'm the only one texturing stuff with seams in Painter, yet I seem to be the only one with this issue, so it must be something that I am doing wrong.

do I need to have experience in the industry if I want to get gud at modeling/rendering?I want to freelance but I have trouble learning on my own.everyone I look up to has experience or is working in the industry.

Why is this problem always happening in 3ds max? At some point, the model just slowly fades away and this little broken icon appears in the middle of a viewport. Gizmo at the bottom left is also broken. Nothing can fix it, and viewports get bugged one by one until I have to export a model to a new project.

>>583330This is the one thing about Max that routinely makes me want to headbutt a spike. The viewport point-of-interest and rotate around cursor functions are absolute complete and utter fucking shit.

Anyone know where I can find info on or just a set up on a good latex like Blender Cycles node setup?There are some I found with google but they didn't quite look right. I want like a gimp suit effect but can't seem to quite get it right with the glossy settings.All I've got now is just a Glossy + Diffuse but I never can seem to get the mix rate or roughness right. Any tips?

>>583625I think this guy's on the right track with using a velvet node.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW8Ifl6IW_4

Since it's rubber and not latex you'll need to adjust it a bit to look smoother but this should be a great starting point, everything I've seen for latex has just been an infinitely smooth mirror but this is much more grounded in appearance.

How can I make my lights look like flash? I want that flat look without many details, basically so it looks like when you shoot a picture with flash in a dark room. I'm specifically doing it in UE4, but I guess the theory behind this will be enough. What makes a light in a scene look like a frozen flashlight that just got off? I hope I explained it decently enough.

I'm an utter novice when it comes to everything concerning 3D modelling. All I want to do is recreate a simple real-world object. I should be able to do this using almost entirely arbitrarily-sized rectangular prisms. What would be the best way to go about doing this?

>>584048Basically you want the light to be situated directly above the camera between 10-20cm, and have it also be the most intense light in the scene, because part of the "flash look" is not just that the flash is being used improperly (lighting the subject directly), but that it's also the strongest source of light in the scene. You even want the ambient lighting to be barely there. Flash bulbs are also a very small light source with a narrow falloff, so they tend to produce rather harsh light and crisp shadows.

>>584161I only know how you'd do this Max, just align the pivot to the hinge and then use wire parameters to set up a new hinge slider that rotates the door within a certain range. Does blender have tools to create new parameters with?

>>584171>using SDSBut why? You do that for smooth curved surfaces, for something like this you can just draw the hinge bracket with a spline and extrude, and boolean it together with a cylinder, maybe clean up the edges if you also want to smooth it.

Blender 2.79 helphttps://youtu.be/_06cWLUZ_BgFollowing this↑ guys videos and got to this one, there is a problem with 2.79 and I'm not sure why but the mask doesn't apply when adding the adjustment layer for me.It goes: >switch to video editing, add uv edit panel, import clip to timeline and uv panel, switch to mask mode, draw your mask with ctrl+click, autokeyframe, add adjustment layer, change adjustment layer modifier to mask; at this point it doesn't apply like in his video, finishing his steps doesn't fix it.How do you do filters and layers in blender 2.79?

>have your diffuse texture assigned to material>make sure its ticked in the texture tab>make another new texture ontop of that by the same size>uncheck that texture>go to edit mode, make sure the model is unwrapped.>pick the new empty texture from the dropdown in the image editor>go back to object mode>goto bake, bake textures - and hit bake>the margin is the padding, should be set to 16 pixels by default

>>584161not quite sure what you're trying to do but if you want the door to rotate on the edge and be still on the hinge like a... door, you can just move origin of its mesh to the spot that will be in contact with the hinge and then any rotation applied to the door will have the hinge as the center.